Freshman quarterback picked football despite MLB opportunity

It was June 2008, and Butch Jones and his coaching staff were worried.

Ryan Radcliff, a top incoming quarterback, had just been drafted by the Colorado Rockies in the Major League Baseball Draft.

“It’s like we had to start the recruiting process all over again,” Jones said.

But the 34th-round draft pick was thinking football. In fact, for 10 months, he had not even thought much about baseball.

“Being that I got drafted later on, that kind of made the decision easier,” said Radcliff, who was drafted as a catcher.

Both a pitcher and catcher at Fairview High School in Sherwood, Ohio, the redshirt freshman decided to stick with the Chippewas. He now is competing with sophomore Derek Rifenbury for No. 2 on the depth chart behind senior starter Dan LeFevour. The spot was vacated by departing senior Brian Brunner, who stepped in for an injured LeFevour in four games last season.

Radcliff is savoring the chance to take his first collegiate snap in the fall.

“Now that the reward is in front of me, it makes it a lot nicer,” he said. “You get to apply everything that you put in during the last year.”

Radcliff was highly recruited out of high school. He set an Ohio state record in a 2006 game by throwing for 678 yards. His nine touchdown passes in the game tied the state mark.

He turned down offers from six other Mid-American schools, including Western Michigan, Eastern Michigan and Ball State.

Even though he might have had a shot to start at those schools by now, Radcliff said the chance to study under LeFevour for a few years was an opportunity he could not pass up.

“I liked how I could learn from Dan and have that figure I could look up to,” he said. “I loved the campus, the people, the facilities.”

But Radcliff’s days as a baseball player are not unnoticeable.

“With Ryan, the most amazing thing is his arm strength,” LeFevour said.

Jones agrees with LeFevour’s assessment, but believes Radcliff still needs to continue his adjustment process.

“Now it’s just having his mind catch up with the speed of the game,” he said.

Radcliff grew up in Hicksville, Ohio (population 3,425), but he attended high school in Sherwood (population 810), because of school district boundaries.

“At my school, there were three farm fields and the school was on the other side,” he said. “That’s the only reason there weren’t four farm fields around it.”

He had to adjust from a place where he held 14 career or single-season records to being an understudy during CMU’s 2008 season.

“You’re used to being ‘the guy,’ and then you come in here and you’ve got three or four guys in front of you,” Radcliff said. “But it’s nice to see it from a different perspective and see where you’ve got to work back to.”

sports@cm-life.com